Memo

To: Former members of X-tal
From: Long time listener

I don't know how often you hear this from people or whether you find it embarassing, lame, irrelevant to the concerns of your status quos, whatever.

But this afternoon, as I often do, I put on Everything Crash and began going through my normal routine of paperwork, writing, etc. And then "Easily Impressed" came on, and my brain just stopped everything and listened to it all the way through...and again. Then did the same with "Pacemaker." I probably listened to those two songs over and over for a good 20-25 minutes. Let them really get deep into my mind.

And I just wanted to let you know, you got it. You really got it. I'm happy to see the continuing, growing interest in your stuff, because you really went somewhere musically and politically few dared to go. Well done, and thanks. --mjs

Christmas 2007 : "cast out our fears and open eyes, o give us voice today!"

Most years I can write up a brief Christmas message for my friends, full of a little personal insight and a fair amount of polemic. This year it's been harder. It's been a challenging one on almost every level, happy mostly (as the past six years have been) but with challenges to nearly every level of my life and consciousness...and tough times for many friends and family. I'll be thinking of a few of those people, sending them happy and constructive vibes during my two-week "break," talking to people who need conversation, and spending a lot of time reflecting on my own limits. And, of course, playing with the children.

Long story short, I can't find anything profound to say for Christmas this year. But Stephen Leah, a progressive Christian activist, wrote this updated hymn that I found very moving--even as someone who's tried to be equally critical of the violence on both sides of the Israeli occupation, to the point of pissing off my friends--and not just accurate, but poetically accurate. I don't agree with the theology of the guy giving the sermon where the Leah hymn appears, but the hymn itself is simple, unapologetic, and makes me shiver a bit.

O Little Town of Bethlehem
Imprisoned you now lie.
Above thy deep and silent grief,
Surveillance drones now fly.
And through thy old streets standeth,
A huge illegal Wall.
The hopes and dreams that peace will come
Are dashed in this year’s Fall.
O morning stars together,
Look down upon this crime.
The people sing to God the King
But justice, who can find?
Yes, Christ was born of Mary,
God’s love remains supreme.
But mortals sleep as children weep,
Their pain is never seen.
How silently, how silently,
The world and Church protests.
As checkpoints grow and towns confined,
As settlers steal and rest.
No ear may hear the outcry,
As Israel’s Wall is built.
While meek souls muse, Apartheid rules -
We speak or share in guilt.
O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
Give strength to us,
we pray.
Cast out our fears and open eyes.
O give us voice today!
We stand against injustice,
The Occupation must end.
May justice rule our Lord’s birthplace,
May now Christ’s peace descend.

Maybe this Christmas, Christians in the U.S. could think about what agents of the Israeli government are doing to Christians as well as Muslims in Palestine. It's time for a mass demand that violence, brutality and misleadership stop there, and everywhere. And the next time you hear a Christian in the United States assume that the default position on Israeli occupation is uncritical support, do some homework and challenge them on that. (And I'll include my obligatory but important acknowledgement that Palestinian leadership is cynical and exploitative, and unconditional support for either side in this conflict is not the answer). Peace on earth, good will to all. Yeah, that's what I was looking to say...something like that. Happy holidays everybody.

Orgasms, Peace, and Population Control: Err…that’s a yes on the first two and a no on the third, y’all…

I’m very happy to see the second annual Global Orgasm for Peace is tomorrow/actually today for those of us here in the U.S. I’m a fan of orgasms and peace, and despite how some stuffy old lefties might feel about it, I think there’s a clear, if not always enunciable, relationship between the two. It’s not merely that sexuality is energy; it’s that even the possibility, the memory, and the anticipation of sexual joy generates happiness in those who experience it. It’s a universal happiness—at least for the sexually emancipated—and is both literally and metaphorically life-affirming. For a small time commitment, a whole lot of people will be bringing on (or is that bringing off?) sexual joy for peace. Even linking the two rhetorically is a healthy, progressive act with no real disadvantages.

But this part of the announcement upset me greatly:

“Remember, over-population (6.8 billion people and counting) is a major cause of ‘peak everything’, so please don’t make more babies in the Global-O.”

With that single, out-of-place sentence, BaringWitness.org turned their advocacy of unbridled joy into bridled partisanship. The problems of “overpopulation” are really the problems of imperialism and class inequality, and the invocation of overpopulation without any prior acknowledgement of classism or imperialism is a tired and dangerous discourse indeed.

Others explain it better than I could: Steve Rosenthal has a fine piece elucidating the fascist nature of overpopulation science (tied to sociobiology and a fixed view of human nature) in the context of Africa. More sweeping commentaries address the way in which population discourse is used to obscure the role of capital and class inequality in either enforcing an artificial scarcity or ignoring real scarcity (see, for example, Louis Proyect). Population control isn’t progressive. Repeating unreflective causal assertions about population is not pro-peace. In fact, it’s a pointless and potentially dangerous distraction.

Not to mention, it’s a serious downer. What if a baby is made during this all-important moment of collective bliss? That could be a very special baby. Who is BaringWitness.org to tell me, or anybody, not to make a baby while participating in a worldwide collective sex act for peace, for crying out loud?

Finally: If anything, progressives need to make more babies. Nuff said.

I’m open to discuss any of these arguments, but all I am saying is the little self-righteous warning was neither necessary nor desirable, it’s in poor taste and if it does indeed reflect a dominant ideological outlook in the people responsible for the Global-O, then it’s time for them to re-think this or turn the project over to somebody else. I’ll close with some vintage Fred Engels:

it is absurd to talk of overpopulation so long as "there is 'enough waste land in the valley of the Mississippi for the whole population of Europe to be transplanted there"; so long as no more than one third of the earth can be considered cultivated, and so long as the production of this third itself can be raised six fold and more by the application of improvements already known.

Seriously, though: We should all participate in the Global Orgasm for Peace tonight/tomorrow. There’s simply no downside to it. It will lift our spirits and has the potential to make us aware of a fundamental, deep and ineffable connection between the individual erotic and the universal imperative of love. Happy orgasming. Remember: Solstice Day - December 22, at 06:08 Universal Time (GMT)

Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

We visited the cemetery during our last full day in Paris, last Wednesday.

Paris is a site of multiple perspectives, multiple struggling forces, a plurality of currents sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing. This is fully reflected in the Père Lachaise. The cemetery seemed to me to be a site of free expression, within the boundaries of acceptable communication about the dead (and such boundaries are relatively loose and negotiable) and political struggle. Royalty being royal, military heroes glorifying their sacrifices, communists and socialists (graves piled with flowers) displaying the symbols of revolution for a better life, Holocaust victims and survivors... As in other parts of Paris, the self-reflection and contradictory nature of the French state, and French civil society, was apparent in the very design of things, in the the way the materials were themselves arranged, from the stone work and symbols to the layout of the whole place to the management of the many trees and bushes growing in it. This feeling is difficult to describe in writing, but maybe the photos will help make sense of it.

A vast, town-sized cemetery with neighborhoods of graves along twisting cobblestone paths, separated (regimented, like much of Paris's attempt to regulate the chaotic) by "divisions."

I'm standing next to the Communards' Wall, where the leaders of the Paris Commune were executed. I was overwhelmed by the understated nature of that memorial, as well as the fact that it wasn't mentioned in any of the "official" tourist literature on or in Paris. I knew what I was looking for only because I had read extensively about the Commune a couple of years earlier. A very important site, in a cemetery likely shared by some of the Communards' executioners.

The communal grave of many activists, most famously Paul Lefargue and Laura Marx Lefargue, married best friends who took their own lives together when they felt they were growing too old to do any more good...Paul wrote a wonderful pamphlet entitled "The Right to Be Lazy," and Laura, of course, was the most Marxist of Marx's daughters.

Various symbols, from the socialist Prometheus to a Rodan-like sculpture by a lesser-known sculptor.

Jim Morrison's grave after the removal of the famous bust that was always getting vandalized and stolen. I'm not a Morrison fan, btw...and even suggested to Andrea that a great punk cover would be a picture of one or both of us flipping off the grave. But we had come all that way, why not see it...

This cat was the only live animal I saw personally at the cemetery, and it seemed to me to be very determined and purposive in sitting in that particular location.

Memorials of the Shoah in general, and specific Holocaust survivors and victims, were especially disturbing, underscoring a kind of rebellion against the holiness of cemeteries...

They'll never stop lying, ever...

Faiz Shakir on how General Petraeus has altered the latest National Intelligence Estimate to downplay the level of violence in Iraq.

South Korean Hostages To Be Released

In this case, negotiation worked. Good news.

Discussing Debate and Economic Access on Internet Radio...

Andy Ellis interviews me about the debate cooperative movement.

What can congress do? Something crazy!

They won't, but what could they do when a president improperly grants relief to a convicted subordinate? Ian Samuel suggests this solution, admitting of its implausibility in the current system:

The remedy for improperly pardoning one's own convicted subordinates to cover up one's own ongoing criminal conspiracies is already in the Constitution. We do not need a new amendment. The remedy is impeachment and conviction. The House of Representatives should impeach both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their role in this entire conspiracy to obstruct justice. A simple majority in the House of Representatives would be sufficient for that. The Senate poses a somewhat more difficult problem, because it can be expected that the Republicans (either as parties to, or in furtherance of, the same conspiracy to obstruct justice) will not vote to convict. The remedy for this is also in the Constitution; it is Article I, Section 5.
The Senate is perfectly free to determine the "Qualifications of its own Members," and the Democrats could thus refuse to seat the Republicans if they refused to convict. (The Republican Senators could be re-seated after conviction, if they agreed to be bound by its result.) President Pelosi would then presumably direct the Justice Department to initiate ordinary criminal prosecution of both Bush and Cheney, for their roles in the conspiracy. Think it's radical? It is--but not unprecedented. Our Constitution's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws," the Fourteenth Amendment, was ratified 139 years ago this Monday, in exactly that
fashion. Some things are worth fighting for, and the rule of law is one of them. I doubt very much that Congressional Democrats will do these things, but I don't doubt whether they should.

And to anyone who suggests this is a stretch, even an elaboration of the original intent of I:5, well, is your objection that our leaders shouldn't creatively interpret the law for their own purposes? Is your solution, then, to Presidential and Vice Presidential "creativity" to look the other way, or to find a more legitimate way of holding the executive accountable? My question for you is: If impeachment proceedings should not begin now, what, precisely and exactly please, should happen? If nothing can happen...is the admission that there's nothing we can do about it an admission that the system is broken?

4th of July

The reason I didn't post these earlier is that I was trying to block out parts of our Independence Day... We were selling cotton candy and drinks to benefit the childrens' museum, of which Andrea was just elected board president. Scortching hot. Next to us, and I mean literally next to, was the Stage of Extremely Bad Musical Acts who nonetheless should so very *%&# clearly be given the opportunity to shine, their ten to fifteen to fifty seven minutes of fame singing off-key and so very, very, very out of context. More importantly, it seemed, they should be given that opportunity right frigging next to us. In fact, the guy who did the sound came up to us, still fairly early in the day, and said "Oh man, do you folks have to be here all day, next to them? Damn, I feel sorry for you. Hee hee hee..." It was like "Little Miss Sunshine" on acid, not that I'd know, and it was also like a David Lynch movie. Indeed, the sounds of talentlessness (most commonly in the form of off-key "Let Freedom Ring" covers, although yes, someone covered "Proud to be an American"--dammit, that's my song--and passed out flags to wave ONLY during the chorus.) forced us all in and out of consciousness just like Henry in Eraserhead, even though we sold a crapload of cotton candy, enjoyed delicious polish dogs, watched our aspiring artist-children, and nearly lost Andrew twice in the midst of thousands of people...thousands of hot, sweaty, patriotic human bodies...because freedom, after all, isn't free.

Thanks to other members of the WCM board, there was much handling of snakes and spinning of the candy cotton...

Not yet two, Abigail paints and draws for a significant portion of every day. We set up huge canvases for kids (of all ages) to express themselves. Nobody took advantage of the free space for any political slogans, electing instead to paint anti-republican jokes on port-a-potties (see below)...
Although undoubtedly talented and creative, Andrew isn't quite as much of an art junkie as his sister, but he's capable of wearing the proverbial smock...

And they say cowboys have no sense of humor...well, I guess they don't actually say that.

More Fidel on the CIA

It's not exactly a beautiful, flowing composition, but as a follow-up to his previous interviews on the CIA "family jewels," here's Fidel Castro's piece written exclusively for Counterpunch.

For a long time now Castro has deployed a skill that he undoubtedly views as necessary to his, and Cuba's political survival: Talk like a socialist to your own people, but talk like a left-liberal to the rest of the world. Notice, for example, early in the piece, his sentimentality when speaking of JFK junior...

Nevertheless, the piece is insightful...Castro finds "the high level at which the decisions for actions against our country were taken" to be an especially surprising revelation in the new information. His skepticism about the project is probably on-point:

It is notable that the administration which has declassified the least information in the history of the United States, and which has even started a process of reclassifying information that was previously declassified, now makes the decision to make these revelations. I believe that such an action could be an attempt to present an image of transparency when the government is at an all time low rate of acceptance and popularity, and to show that those methods belong to another era and are no longer in use. When he announced the decision, General Hayden, current CIA Director, said: "The documents offer a look at very different times and at a very different Agency."
Needless to say that everything described here is still being done, only in a more brutal manner and all around the planet, including a growing number of illegal actions within the very United States.

Although much has already been made of his insistence that Lee Oswald couldn't have acted alone in shooting JFK, this piece of information is even more provocative:

Oswald wanted to come through Cuba on his trip to the USSR. He had already been there before. Someone sent him to ask for a visa in our country's embassy in Mexico but nobody knew him there so he wasn't authorized. They wanted to get us implicated in the conspiracy.

So he's seen better days and it's disappointing that he doesn't use this unique forum to mention the relationship between intelligence agencies and global capitalism, but viva a free press, and the opportunity to hear the rather reasonable memoirs of a U.S. "enemy."

weird london business...

Some pointed and thought-provoking questions by Andy Ellis, cross-posted from edebate...

why is al queda in iraq "dropping off" car bombs in london? Suicide attacks seem to be their typical MO.

Granted IED's have been an oft used weapon, but these cars are not seemingly the way to introduce ied's to the west when much smaller easier to build devices are more simple and in some senses more terrifying.

Car bombs of this style seem to be the work of secular terrorists like tim mcveigh or the ira at points during the last several decades, But AQ-I car bombs seem their most effective when the driver sticks with the car till the bomb goes off, and this makes sense given the ideology of the org (as represented in the west). Why would AQ-I waste valuble resources like doctors on half assed car bombs, clearly they have people who can build car bombs.

And apparently they have strategic interest in doctors, but it seems like its against the stated strategic interest to have doctors who dont die in car bombings, get arrested.

It seems like before these guys blew up aq-i 's british doctor spot they would have done the things that doctors can uniquely do and would have risked it on something that a variety of people could do better.

Why is the terrorism link to the british medicine system being drawn out in the media right as michael moores critique offers it as an alternative?

I already told Andy that I think he may be discounting one possibility: that Al Qaeda, as lucky as it has been in the past (and really only a few times, kind of like a lucky streak), is an incompetent organization. Their high-casualty attackes (only a few successful ones, and we're not exactly talking mass casualties even in those) are creditable mainly to the even more blatant incompetence of the west. But my answer doesn't make even a few of Andy's questions go away. What's going on doesn't make any sense. Someone's narrative has been disrupted.

His last question--about Michael Moore--is only wacky-sounding in proportion to the likelihood of strange things happening. But how many times have strange things happened--things so outlandish that they seemed utterly inconceivable beforehand? Did Zarqawi even exist? Remember that conversation?

When one considers how closely tied are the original, foundational and most powerful financial and political interests in both the west and "radical islam," it doesn't seem so farfetched: the idea that their strategies and the representations of those strategies bleed in and out of one another.

just sayin'...

Castro charges CIA more murderous than ever

HAVANA (Reuters) - Convalescing Cuban President Fidel Castro charged on Sunday the release of classified CIA documents detailing past abuses was a smoke screen behind which the Bush administration hoped to hide even worse methods. "I think that this action could be an attempt ... to make people believe that these methods belong to another era and are no longer used," Castro wrote in an editorial published by the communist country's official media. "Everything described in the documents is still being done, only in a more brutal manner around the entire planet, including an increasing number of illegal actions in the very United States." The CIA declassified on Tuesday hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detailed some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping. The documents are known in the CIA as the "Family Jewels" and some describe the agency's efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, believed to be a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro. "Sunday is a good day to read what appears to be science fiction," Castro began his three-page editorial, titled "The Killing Machine." He went on to quote extensively from material covering the attempt on his life, as well as a New York Times analysis of all the documents. Cuba charges that Castro has been the target of hundreds of assassination attempts. The Cuban leader has said numerous times that President George W. Bush has ordered him killed. Castro also reiterated in detail his long-held belief that U.S. President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, was the victim of a plot involving elements of the CIA and militant anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Castro, a
master sharp-shooter with a telescopic rifle, insists Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the only shooter in Dallas. "You lose the target after every shot even if it is not moving and have to find it again in fractions of a second," he said. Castro has not been seen in public since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery in July last year, when he handed over power temporarily to his younger brother, Raul. But the 80-year-old revolutionary has returned to public life since March by writing occasional articles, called "Reflections of the Commander in Chief." He has been writing more frequently in recent weeks, fueling speculation that his health is improving.

Listen to your Uncle Fidel, kiddies...

proletarian paperclip

Assessing the Goracle

What follows is more gamesmanship than serious political argument. If a democrat loses the White House in '08, people like me will be blamed for it. Gore's a hack, sure. But it's important to understand why many progressives, and even a few aspiring socialists, will vote for him. He looks good pragmatically and, if you put on some rose-colored glasses, he even starts to look good ideologically. I think he can win the general election.

Gore is in a lot of corporate interests' back pockets, and has a pretty sordid history of supporting systems that hurt working people (issues I will explore here in the near future). But let's see what the progressive pollyana argument about him really is... It begins with a piece by Ted Daley--a smart left-democrat activist with loads of experience, including working for the Rand Corporation (ouch) and serving on the staffs of Alan Cranston and Dennis Kucinich. His case for the merits of a Gore presidency is indeed rather rose-colored, but his confidence that Gore can win is not, in my opinion, misplaced. On the question of Gore's electability, Daley writes:

there is one more asset that Al Gore brings to the table. Something unique only to him. In 2000 --even with Ralph Nader siphoning 2.8 million votes from just over 100 million ballots cast -- the sitting vice president still beat the sitting governor of Texas nationwide by more than half a million votes. In addition, a great deal of evidence indicates that more Floridians tried to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush -- which means, of course, that Gore actually won in the Electoral College as well.But, at least according to five Supreme Court justices, George Bush won and Al Gore lost. That means that millions of Americans, even many who might not necessarily adore the former vice president, hold a rough recollection that in 2000, Al Gore had something taken away from him that he rightfully earned. And deserved. And won. And that is why the "RAG" bumper sticker, in itself, will be worth ten million votes next time around, for this candidate and this candidate alone. First in the primaries, then again in the general election.What is the "RAG" bumper sticker? "RE-ELECT AL GORE."

Pretty optimistic, Ted. But realistic? I think so. Keep in mind I won't vote for Gore and people like me will be blamed if he gets robbed again... But yesterday's AP reported that "A New Hampshire presidential poll by WHDH-TV and Suffolk University shows that local Democrats prefer Al Gore to any of the current contenders ... Al Gore ... could enter the race as the leader. When his name is added, Clinton loses more than a quarter of her support, while Gore is backed by 32 percent."

Here's what Gore has that I think establishes a higher level of "charisma" than any of the other democrats; I'll address only Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.

1. Moral capital from the 2000 election. Nobody else has it, obviously. He's handled the debacle amazingly well, balancing acceptance with focused political anger.

2. Intellectual capital that has less of a chance being turned against him at this particular political moment than eight years ago. There's a backlash against both real preachers and the preacherly logic of neoconservatism. There's a fashionable religious liberalism movement emerging. Gore comes off as smarter and deeper than Hillary, more wise than Obama, and more broadly knowledgable than Edwards.

3. Experiential capital. He's been there but doesn't have to defend Clintonism, and his beating Sen. Clinton will simply reaffirm that distinction.

4. War capital. He doesn't have to take the blame for any of the Dems' inevitable stumbling on Iraq since the mid-terms. He opposed it from the beginning and was the first biggie to call Bush out for becoming a dictator. The Senate dems, and Edwards, look good compared to any Republican contenders on this issue, but they look bad compared to Gore. Oh, and Gore also has a squeaky clean record on support for Israel. Not even any clumsy photo-ops with Arab extremists like Hillary has...

Frankly, I think anyone besides Gore stands a decent chance of losing if the Republicans figured out a way to play smart rather than desperate. But Gore could beat the best, most unthinkably good Republican candidate in 08.

Gore's negatives? Please, there are no new ones. Climate change "extremism?" I suppose that might be a risk, but it's a purely defensive one: Being a warming believer doesn't COST you capital these days. At worst it's a neutral, but all the momentum is going positive. He's boring? Arrogant? Umm...none of that mattered then, and it matters even less now. Plus we know he's funny. He's the motherf****n Goracle, for hells' sake. Self-depricating humor always rules...

Is he sexy? Rection is somewhat mixed, but his looks certainly aren't a liability. Here's what a quick buddy list poll revealed:

--"U bet!"
--"not in the traditional sense, but in the nerdy sense"
--"Obama's got him beat, but yeah, I could see it"
--"i don't find al gore sexy because he put on that weight and is championing a fight against global warming."
--"not just kind of sexy...he's SEXY, even after putting on weight."
--"Obama is sexier than Gore, but Gore is sexier than Senator Clinton."

Here's the clincher, though, folks: What most people believe killed Gore in 00 was his willingness to alienate the left. I disagree that Nader "cost" Gore the election, but in any event I don't think it would happen again; Gore will be able to exploit his opponents' weaknesses in the primaries to get his lefty credentials out early and often. In the bitterest of ironies eight years after the proclamation that liberalism is dead, a liberalism that includes not sending troops to die for lies is extremely fashionable. Gore's eventual Republican opponent, whoever it is, will not be able to spin a countervision that overcomes Gore's multiple tiers of capital (see above). Next thing you know, he's in the White House...possibly for two terms.

Daley also points out that a Gore-Obama ticket will look very attractive to Obama's handlers.

Remember, all this is just speculation. I'm open to competing thoughts and predictions. And I doubt the Democratic leadership will ever make the right choices; if the dems win it will be because the repubs are extremely weak, which will be the dems' own dumbass luck. But if they suddenly get smart, they'll run this guy again, and I think he'd give any number of republican candidates a country ass whipping.

profiteering part what?

Can't believe we still periodically mention this after four bloody and miserable years.

From Robert Scheer's well-titled "The Banality of Greed:"

This week's evidence of the continuing corruption of Halliburton and its subsidiaries profiteering from contracts costing American taxpayers an unbelievable $22 billion stems from a report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The report, only one of many about Halliburton's recently severed subsidiary KBR, focuses on work done in Baghdad's super-secure Green Zone. While parent company Halliburton insults U.S. taxpayers by relocating its headquarters to the tax shelter of Dubai, subsidiary KBR has been spun off to focus more directly on the American military contracts that form the core of its operations. Those operations have already produced a litany of condemnation by congressional and administration oversight bodies, and the June 25 report hardly details the company's most egregious activities. However, the Green Zone, the site of this latest instance of taxpayer fleecing, is instructive because, safely removed from the risks of battle, it deprives these war profiteers of their favorite excuse: that construction in a battle zone is inherently more costly. While KBR's Green Zone shenanigans covered by this report may seem small in comparison with the enormous waste attendant to the U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, they are illustrative of the feeding frenzy that has fueled the American effort.